Ricky and Boar wandered across the scorched and unfamiliar lands of the Eldros Kingdom, the once-vibrant Thousand Emerald Forest now a distant, smoldering silhouette behind them. Black smoke curled high into the sky, staining the horizon as the wind whispered the cries of dying trees and charred spirits.
Ash clung to Boar's wooden hide, and Ricky's crystalline wings shimmered faintly with soot as they pushed forward into the unknown.
For hours, they moved in silence—one gliding through the air, the other galloping across cracked and flattened plains. The terrain had shifted drastically. The lush green canopy and tangled roots of the forest were replaced by rolling flatlands, barren and dry, stretching endlessly like a forgotten graveyard under the blood-tinged sky.
"I think we're heading in the wrong direction…" Boar's voice finally broke the stillness.
